East of the West:
A few words about the stories

When I was a child, I did not much like to read, because I was lazy
and preferred to play soccer outside. I did not like to be read to
either, because repetition bored me and because my parents were
really good story tellers – for years my mother told me about the
adventures of two little hippos (brother and sister) who we’d send
around the world and get into all sorts of trouble, while my father
told me stories about Bulgarian history: khans, tsars, rebels
fighting the Turks.
As a college student in the US, I wrote stories of my own,
pseudo-American stories influenced by my teenage love of Stephen
King, a writer I still admire greatly. It became apparent, very
quickly, that the fake American stories I wrote were unconvincing
garbage. Taking a class in Western History, I was amazed to find out
that the professor was writing his dissertation on janissaries in
the Balkans. He asked me if I could translate a Bulgarian text for
him. I was mesmerized, the way I’d been as a child, by our own
history. How could I have forgotten it? Why was I not writing
stories like these, packed with heroism, betrayal, courage and
cowardice, freedom and death?
And so I began this book. I wanted people to listen and be
moved by our tales, and to show them that Bulgarians are not all car
thieves and prostitutes, though there are plenty of those too. As a
boy I’d listened to my father and felt calm and safe, and twenty
years later I wanted to feel that same way. Writing about Bulgaria
was the only way I knew that would get me back to Bulgaria – not
just my family, whom I miss greatly, but also our muddy village
roads, black fields, blue mountains...

A few words on Bulgarian history:

Bulgaria was founded in 681 AD, and
was a great European power for about six hundred years. Then, like
Greece, Serbia, and other countries of the Balkans (the name comes
from a Turkish word that means ‘chain of wooded mountains’), it fell
under Ottoman rule. Only in 1878 it was finally free to make its own
history again. The enlarged Bulgaria envisioned by the treaty that
ended this conflict alarmed the Great Powers, who were guided by the
‘divide and conquer’ principle (just look at the term balkanization,
used to mean the process of fragmentation or division of a state.)
And so they started to chip away at our territories. The Balkan Wars
ignited, and Bulgaria seized the first opportunity to get the land
back that we’d lost in the wars: we allied with Germany during World
War I, lost that war, and lost even more land.
All this fighting and losing was bad
for our morale, and many young people fell in love with Communism,
which spoke of strange and beautiful ideas like fraternity and
equality and power to the workers. An uprising in 1923 was crushed
by the Tsarists, and Bulgaria stayed a monarchy until the second
major uprising in 1944 when the Communist Party took complete
control of the country for 45 years.

Back to the stories:

In EAST OF THE WEST we have stories
that speak of Bulgaria as it was during the Ottoman years and then
as it was during the fights for liberation from the Turks. There are
stories that speak of the Balkan Wars, of the chokehold and fall of
Communism. There are stories that speak of what became of both
Christians and Muslims in Bulgaria when regimes changed. Then
finally there are stories that show the reader what’s happening now,
while so many young people leave for the West in search of a better
life. The final and most modern story of the collection, “Devshirmeh,”
leads us onward in time, but also twists and takes us back, and like
a snake bites its own tail.
Once upon a time the Turks stole
Bulgarian boys and turned them into Ottoman soldiers. This is the
Devshirmeh, the blood tribute. It is an awful, sentimental, tragic
part of our folklore, but if we read historical sources carefully,
we can find instances when parents offered their children to the
Turks – because a Muslim soldier could live a much better life than
a Christian peasant.

The stories in
EAST OF THE WEST tackle all these upheavals of history
individually, and through individuals, but I believe that when read
together the stories complement each other, like pieces in a puzzle
adding up to reveal a larger picture.
Today, more than a million Bulgarians
live abroad, and I have seen countless parents (my own included)
encourage their children to leave, to seek a better life away from
home; and I’ve seen Bulgarians change their names, abandon their
language, take on new beliefs, new ideologies and identities, forget
where they came from. Yes, history repeats itself and nothing is new
under the sun, but history can be forgotten. With this book, I
wanted to remember.

Map of contemporary Bulgaria

Table of Contents

There are eight stories in East of the West.
Here you can find either the opening paragraph of each or an excerpt
that I thought captures the story's voice.

First Bulgarian Empire* Brief Timeline

811 Khan
Krum slays Emperor Nicephorus I in battle and, according to the
legend, turns his skull into a drinking cup.

864 Boris I
converts Bulgaria to Christianity.

886 Boris I
offers refuge to the disciples of the saint brothers Cyril and
Methodius. Two of these disciples - Clement of Ohrid and Naum of
Preslav, both of noble Bulgarian origin, perfect the Glagolic
alphabet originally created by Cyril and Methodius. They name the
new alphabet Cyrillic, in honor of their teacher. Bulgaria adopts
this new alphabet as official.

913 Simeon
I The Great assumes the title Tsar, thus becoming the first tsar
in history (the first Russian tsar won't be born for a few more
centuries).

20 August 917
Tsar Simeon I defeats the Byzantine emperor in the battle of
Acheloos, one of the largest in medieval European history.
Bulgaria reaches its largest territory, spreading over land
between the Aegean, the Adriatic and the Black Sea.

927- 968
The Bogomil heresy spreads through Bulgaria during the rule of
Tsar Peter I. Centuries later the Bogomil heretics reach Italy and
France, where people dub them Bougres (Bulgres). The word
passes into English as bugger.

July 29, 1014
Tsar Samuil loses the Battle of Kleidion (Klyuch). The Byzantine
Emperor Basil II divides the 14,000 Bulgarian soldiers into groups
of 100, blinds 99 in each group and leaves the 100th with one eye
so he could lead the others home. With this Basil II gains the
nickname Boulgaroktonos (the Bulgar-slayer). In 1205, as a
counter-derivative, Tsar Kaloyan adopts the sobriquet Rōmaioktonos
(Romanslayer).

1018 the
Bulgarian Empire is conquered by the Byzantine. It stays under
Byzantine rule, as Theme of Bulgaria, with Skopje as its capital,
for 150 years until
the rebellion of the brothers Asen and Peter in 1185.